Cryptocartographer

I’ve run a festival for my players before. They were in a village, managed to defeat a baddie, and the influx of well-wishers, news hounds, gossips, and opportunists soon turned the town into an impromptu two-day party. The heroes got an award from the mayor, there was dancing, and jugglers threw things about.

Mostly I ran it narratively. Trying to figure out a bunch of guess-my-weight and dunk-the-halfling mechanics on the fly seemed like a bit much.

That’s precisely what Festivals, Feasts & Fairs is meant to address. It provides a bunch of background, color, and mechanics for the kinds of activities our adventurers would find at a festival. Feats of strength, carnival games, fortune telling. It’s basically a set of mini-games that allow your players to use their skills to try their luck on the carnival fairway.

I’ll reproduce some of the ToC here to give you an idea of the breadth of content:

Denizens Of The Circus

Attractions

Competitions

Carnival Games

Visiting The Fortune Teller

Vendors

Items Around The Carnival

Backgrounds

Designing Custom

The PDF is well laid out in a familiar style, and contains internal links to all sections. My only quibble is that I’d love to see a more comprehensive link list as I would likely run this on my laptop during a session.

I think if you generated a few memorable NPCs and had this supplement at the ready, you could fill an entire session with your PCs just wandering around shooting arrows at targets and eating fried foods. If this sounds like something you could use, I recommend it.

Here’s an update to Humanoid Activities in the Wild, a collection of rollable tables. It’s a list of over 100 things for your baddies to be doing when your PCs encounter them. Now with updated lists and fancy, RPG-style formatting.

These cards make it easy to hand out spells as loot, and to help keep these valuable magical items from getting lost in players’ inventory lists. Includes the 8 Scrolls of Protection, 7 blank Spell Scrolls, and a reference card for novice casters.

Three Adobe Illustrator style set designed for subterranean cartography. The Classic (bold outlines with hatched fill, The Lazy (quick crosshatching around the borders), and The Obsessive (bold outlines with stones and stippling.)

CryptoCartographer

Welcome to Cryptocartographer.net, the RPG home of Jay Robinson. I'm a designer by day and a game enthusiast by night. I make things for my own games and present them here in the hope that they'll prove useful to others.